Good morning!  And welcome to June.  As is usual for this time of the year, Southern California is overcast and gloomy.  Saturday I went sailing - overcast and gloomy.  Yesterday I went cycling - same.  Fortunately this is only temporary ... makes me happy I don't live in Seattle or the Netherlands :)

Hmmm... both Seattle and the Netherlands feel like places where they get a lot done.  Whereas Southern California, not so much.  So is gloom good for productivity?

I took this picture yesterday, while riding up to what was the Reagan Ranch, Northwest of Santa Barbara.  Railroad tracks are weird, right?  They're kind of like roads, but unlike roads they cut straight through everything, and don't branch (at least, not that much).  They go wherever they go, but you can't change where they go, even if you don't know where they're going.  It seems like people would build little vehicles to travel on them more often ... of course, there is always the danger of trains ...

Not gloomy at all: Life lessons from Clarence Thomas.  Weird that he is underappreciated just because he's black; in another world, he would be justly celebrated. 

So, Alberto Contador won the 2015 Giro, in fine fashion, recovering from a number of near-disasters and never winning an individual stage but dominating overall despite having a weak team.  Astana were clearly the strongest, with Fabian Aru finishing 2nd and Mikel Landa 3rd.  My favorite rider was Rider Hesjedal, who survived a bad first week and recovered to fifth overall, animating all the big climbs at the end (he was so strong, they tested his bike for a motor :).  Second favorite was Steven Kruijswijk, who finished seventh and nearly won the KOM prize.  A great grand tour. 

Next up: the Criterium du Dauphine, the last run up to Le Tour.  Gentlemen, start your Tivos uTorrents!

Perfect: Using an MC Escher drawing to demonstrate the Droste effect.  What's amazing is that Escher did this all manually, with his only tool a slide rule... 

Jeffrey Zeldman: My website is twenty years old today.  "I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that’s something."  Awesome!  And I've been subscribed to his feed nearly that long... 

Tim Bray on link rot: the Web Decay graph.  "I've been writing this blog since 2003 and in that time have laid down, along with way over a million words, 12,373 hyperlinks. I've noticed that when something leads me back to an old piece, the links are broken disappointingly often. So I made a little graph of their decay over the last 144 months."  Yeah, I've noticed the same thing - and now I have to write a utility to generate the same graph :)  Interestingly, it feels like links to blogs are more likely to persist than links to news sites. 

Onward into the month!